Light Up Your Life With LEDs, Sewable Circuitry

In the future, we'll all be wearing glowing, light-up, circuit-laden fashions.

Wait, the future? You can do that now!

If you've always dreamed of colorful, glowing accoutrements, or just have some ideas for an upcoming Halloween costume, grab your soldering iron and a sewing needle: Here are a couple of products you can use to get a real 21st-century look.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

LED Ribbon and Wire

Envy those cool blue glowing strips on Sam and Quora’s costumes in TRON: Legacy? You can get that look using Cool Neon’s LED ribbon.

The company also has a variety of flexible, glowing wire. Both the ribbon and the wire use LEDs and phosphor for illumination and are surrounded by vinyl to provide different coloring options.

Celebrities like Katy Perry and Kanye West have sported custom-made Cool Neon designs: Katy Perry wore a Peacock feather inspired back piece on David Letterman and angel wings at the Grammys, while Kanye West donned a jacket with Cool Neon on SNL. Founder Benjamin James also made Beck a light suit a few years back.

James said that Katy Perry’s wings, his most recent over-the-top project, included 80 sinusoidally oscillating LEDs banked in groups of 10 controlled by 8 custom circuits.

A member of the Cool Neon team said its LED wire is pretty easy to work with -- you just need a little soldering experience. If you don’t have that, Cool Neon has helpfully provided soldering instructions and tips.

Cool Neon’s illuminated wire strips are sold by the foot, up to 330 feet, and cost $1.15 to $1.40 per foot, depending on the diameter. The ribbon is $25 for a 1-meter strip. There's even a waterproof version that Chris Chambers, who was helping out with the company's booth at Maker Faire, used in a pair of swim trunks. I suppose that’s one way to get the ladies’ attention.

Photo: Joshua Hubert's Yeti-Coat is made of Cool Neon's Total Control Lighting LED Pixels. Photo courtesy Joshua Hubert

StarBoards

“I think it’ll get people making more electronic things,” says creator Meredith Scheff about StarBoards, her flexible circuits that can be sewn into garments. She started out designing and making them by hand, but within the next few weeks they’ll be available in more massive quantities through SparkFun.

At her booth at Maker Faire, she was also offering low resistance (2.5 ohms per yard) solderable conductive thread, which can currently be purchased through her Etsy store along with a variety of circuit-filled products she’s made herself.

The thread contains 7 strands and is tin-plated. It has thin nylon filament in the center so that it is strong enough to be used like regular sewing thread.

No other conductive thread currently available is also solderable, Scheff says. And when you pair it with her flexible StarBoards, making circuit and LED embedded clothing and accessories becomes a much more streamlined process.

“After using [Arduino] LilyPad boards and AnioMagic boards I was frustrated with how poorly they integrated with clothing. I had a sample of the material used to make the flexible circuits found in phones and printers and such, and decided I could create something better that could be sewn through on a sewing machine,” Scheff says. Her flexible StarBoards can be ironed onto clothing as well.

So far, she’s gotten a lot of positive feedback from makers incorporating StarBoards into their projects.

Aniomagic Kits

For easy LED sparkle, Aniomagic has several kits that will get you started in e-textiles.

The Aniomagic store features LED-based Beginner Sewing Kits ($5) and larger Sparkle Kits ($20), which allow you to twinkle, flicker, or pulse multiple LEDs. Conductive thread made of strands of spun silver is also available for purchase, but it doesn’t look like it’s necessary to use for the more basic kits.

Sparkfun sells Aniomagic’s interactive, customizable Bracelet Kits ($50). The bracelets use a small button called a schemer for wire-free programming. All you have to do is hold it up to your computer screen -- it uses visible light from a graphical user interface to reprogram the bracelet.

Grace Kim, an Interaction Designer for Yahoo!, led an Aniomagic workshop at Maker Faire’s e-textile lounge. At the workshop, participants, some as young as 10, made an LED wristband using a Sparkle Kit.

"I found that my students responded really well to the platform, as it doesn't require any coding experience," Kim says.

Lightwire

Steve Boverie and Louis M. Brill, also known as Dr. Glowire and Louie Lights, have been providing glowing wires and related accessories to the Bay Area since 1998.

Their Tupperwire Store features all the ingredients you need to make a homemade creation out of glowing wires, or "Lightwire" as they call it: DIY “raw stock”, sequencers, drivers, power supplies, and a variety of other accessories. And with 11 different color options, 5 wire gauge thicknesses, and two levels of brightness (standard or high), you’ve got plenty of options to make sure you’ll get the right glow for your project.

Light ‘N Wire Productions’ wire is phosphor-coated copper wire surrounded by a vinyl sheath. It’s flexible, and it glows when the wire gets excited by high-frequency alternating current. The result is a neon look that’s cool to the touch.

If you’re a little new to the DIY scene, Light 'N Wire offers pre-soldered wire connections for a small fee ($4 per connection), and it also provides a one-day soldering tutorial workshops periodically. Its electroluminescent wire options range from $1.15 to $1.60 per foot.

Image: Light 'N Wire

LilyPad

If you’re already familiar with Arduino programming, then you’re a hop, skip and a jump away from being able to create interactive, circuit-based fashion.

MIT Media Labs’ Leah Buechley developed the wearable LilyPad Arduino, a microcontroller specifically built for e-textiles and clothing. The LilyPad’s circular board is about 2 inches in diameter and can be fully customized with a variety of circuit components.

Monkey Lights

Maybe you’re less interested in glow-ifying your clothes, and more interested in adding some LED bling to other aspects of your life… Your bicycle, for instance.

Adding LEDs to your bike is a great way to increase visibility and attract some attention as you pedal down the street (as long as you’re not giving anyone a seizure in the process). Monkey Lectric’s Monkey Light and Video Pro 7 are two options you can use to easily accomplish the feat.

“I made the first Monkey Light wheel light as an art piece for my own bike,” says Monkey Lectric founder Dan Goldwater. “I was experimenting with pixel art and generative art methods, and these techniques worked wonderfully as a moving artwork on the bike. I love the idea of light painting through the city as I ride.”

As he rode around San Francisco and Oakland, people continually asked Goldwater where they could buy it, and eventually, Monkey Lectric was born to make that possible.

The Monkey Light attaches to the spokes of a bicycle wheel and is comprised of 32 full color LEDs. It provides added visibility by generating customizable full color patterns and effects. You can get the Monkey Light for $60 through Monkey Lectric’s web store.

But if you want to display something specific on your wheels, you want to get the Video Pro 7. It claims to be “the most advanced bike wheel display system in the world,” allowing you to download and display full color videos, pictures, and slideshows. It uses the entire bike wheel as its screen. It’s designed more for professional and commercial applications, but if you really want one, you can visit one of Monkey Lectric’s dealers and fork up around $2,000.